The Passive Observer

Many people is involved when an injustice arises before your eyes. However, not everyone acts this way, and to an observed aggression, the dilemma of intervening, or remain passive. Dilemma that many resolved as the young man who in October last year, seeing as an Ecuadorian girl of sixteen, was victim of a brutal beating with racist overtones in Barcelona, remained passive, watching the scene as if it were a movie, as if he had difficulties to distinguish fiction from reality. The Professor of education psychology at the University of Valencia, Rafael Garcia Ros, noted months in the newspaper La Vanguardia that we live in an individualist society, dominated by selfish and unsupportive approaches. In addition, he claimed that observation of aggression generates an automatic fear response in the observer, that blocks its action against fear that supposed to become victim if it acts.

In 1964, a new woman York, Kitty Genovese was murdered stabbed near his home. More than thirty his neighbors, heard their bereaved cries for help, for more than half an hour, however none helped her, thinking about each one of them, that someone else would do so. It so happened that nobody came, and Kitty died. Because of this, the bystander effect, understood as a psychological phenomenon whereby it is less likely that someone should intervene in a situation of tight spot when there are more people than when you’re alone, was baptized in his day as Genovese syndrome. Demonstrated when many observed an emergency, it seems less likely that one of them intervenes: the responsibility is diffused. Inaction is justified by the idea that that is not my issue, or that things are not as serious, and always underlies the fear of thinking that the risks outweigh the benefits of intervening, and the idea that if AIDS can get you in a mess Vicente Garrido, psychologist, Criminalist and collaborator of Centro Reina Sofia for the study of violence, recalls: in psychology know that help people in need operates a paradox: If there are many people that is likely to help, for other leave needy to the victim; It is the so-called diffusion of responsibility: everyone thinks that the other will do something and nobody does anything, and the indifference of all is the main ally of the aggressor, and helps to perpetuation of the aggression against the defenceless victim.